bare naked family

There is actually a website (I’m going to update these links as soon as I stop messing around with the themes) about a family who is full-timing in an RV and calls the website BareNakedFamily. Yesterday, we were literally, bare naked. But alas there are no pictures because the camera is missing its button which allows pictures to be taken. I’ll see if I can scrounge something up…
We decided to head down to Tulum and drive out the spit of land from Tulum to Punta Allen (Santa Julia on the map). There are two Tulums. One is the town which lives on MX307; banks, lots of tourist stores, a super or two, restaurants, etc.; basically a small town split by the highway. This is the Tulum we know and we always make a special point of hitting the panaderia there for the best bread we’ve found (so far). Yesterday, we headed out through what the guide books call the “hotel zone”. This zone lasts seemingly forever, but the hotels are not the giant development type, but much simpler, more “eco” style hotels and palapas. There were even two camping spots. One of the last hotel-compounds we passed was “Maya Tulum” and now I understand why Julie kept calling her destination “Maya Tulum”. I thought she simply recognized the great Mayan influence in the area but she was actually referencing her hotel name.  (I hate how the emoticons screw up the post, another thing to fix)

There was very little view on the road; it is a dirt/limestone road and runs right through the jungle. Ocassionally you get glimpses of the lagoon (north side of road) or the sea (south side of road). At two points, you’ll come out to the Sea (Punta Yuyum and Zamach) and the view is lovely. By this point you’ve been in the Biosphere for a bit and most of the land is completely unsettled. There is no electricity or water (this far along the spit there are no cenotes and any would probably be contaminated by salt) so it would be very difficult to live there. So it would seem. We did see a couple mansion type complexes; one of which was in the process of being built.

Unfortunately, down here, a deserted or “unspoilt” beach means unspolit by development. They are, however, completely innundated with garbage. Anything plastic; shoes, bottles, bags, chairs, etc. will break down to smaller pieces (though some are completely intact) and cover the beach area. The boys, unsurprisingly, were in their element, with more garbage than they could imagine in immediate proximity. The girls, Jamie and I stripped down to our naked selves and frolicked in the waves. We found a beach that was very flat and shallow but with many waves. As the point of the trip was to see if this road might be of interest to Jamie for bike-riding, we had brought no snorkeling items but I was still quite surprised to see some sort of ray dashing away from me - they simply FLY through the water!

So very many times I wished the camera was working and we might go back another day to play again and take pictures. We did, however, decide that this area (the Yucatan penninsula) is not an area in which Jamie is able to find challenging or desirable rides. Meaning, we most likely will not be building a palapa here. We’d LOVE to come back and spend a few months next winter; perhaps even head down to Belize and Guatemala, but we’ll see.

The girls have been playing with the daughter of Don Pepe, the owner of the RV park. They are having a BLAST as Sammy (the daughter) is four and squarely between Ellen and Sissy in age. Usually it is the boys who drag friends home and the girls try to hang out with them. Sammy has a large playarea completely fenced in with netting, swings, slides; everything a kid could want. After seeing the playarea and the private pool, the boys started reconsidering their stance on not wanting to stay here. 

Today we head to Cancun, to see the “pretty” area, to try to fix the camera and get Jamie a cable for his MP3 player. One thing we’ve found, from visiting so many beaches in the area, is that our favorite is still the beach right next to PaaMul. The deserted turtle sanctuary cove with the “flour” sand.
Ok, looking through the pictures to post, I’ll give a little explanation. There are a couple for the fabric whores (you know who you are), one of Ellen with her implements of consumption (why this child NEEDS to eat with a corkscrew, peeling knife and can opener (yes, these are the implements she uses) is beyond me. One of the aftermath of a guyaba and avocado explosion and one of the kids at our favorite restaurant. They LOVE the tamarind (brown), jimica (dark red) and horchata (white) drinks there.

More from Pikey

I liked Pike’s email to Andrew so much, I decided to post it here. It is so neat to see how they arrange their thoughts and how the express themselves… Plus, my drivel is getting quite boring. I really miss being on the road…

“I got your email - I hope you’ll have a good time in Disneyland. Tomorrow or the next day, actually, yesterday, we found a movie theatre; it’s kind of rare to have a movie theatre around here and it’s 3 dollars a person. And back to the original point; we’ll probably watch “Revenge of the Sith” because its pretty cheap. I’ve got a great interest here in mini beer bottles and earrings. We’ve never been to Disneyland before (”yes you have” says Jesse). Once, a long time ago, so I don’t remember. I’m sure Jesse told you about this in his email, but to me, “The Knights Tale”, was a very good movie. I’m pretty sure that Jesse told you all about the jousting movie and it was back after medieval times. I’m missing you a lot here but we have got a few other friends. But they’re all grownups. Like I told you in the last email, we might be building a palapa here maybe or probably not. But there’s a good chance we will. We’re thinking of just building a palapa here as an investment and a place for us to live 1/2 the year. It’s a paradise to go snorkeling here and a very nice place to build sand castles. Last time we went down to the beach and didn’t build the sand castles out of dirt. Dad’s sickness is over now but he’s hooked to noodle soup. Its very good and Dad’s heating me up some right now. Its called “cup of noodles” and if you go to a big store at home you might find it in stores. The flavors are shrimp, which is called cama”ron here, which means “shrimp” in Spanish. In two or 3 months we may be seeing you.

Well, even though its really fun here sometimes I just miss you a lot.

Today we got out our lego bins and started building. We couldn’t make much because it took up a lot of space and in Mexico here I found a store that sells a big jet plane. It’s really big and big enough for maybe two lego people to maybe fit inside. And its so big that in the US it would cost $20. But here they sell it for seven. Actually here 70 pesos. We’re learning lots of Spanish and I know lots of words.

We’re staying in the same place and it’s very good like I told you in my last email.

Right now Jesse was just picking at my legs and pinching my feet. It ought to be expected cause he had one cup of iced latte this morning. It’s a shot of espresso with coffee and ice.

There’s not so much to say cause its only been a day since I emailed you last. It’s Tuesday here and it’s 11:51am. If you do email me back, please send the day of the week and the time so I’ll know when you wrote the email to me. I hope Sara and Deb and Jeff are doing really well and you too.
Right now we’re sitting in mom’s room on the bed writing an email. I’m going to have my noodle soup now. Also I got a new pair of swiming trunks. I hope you’re all doing well love pikey”

jesse, not to be outdone

Well, for one thing, I don’t particularly like baseball, but I do like balls and trying to throw it into stuff. And I like trying to hit stuff with bats and stuff but I don’t have a real bat so I need to hit it with thick sticks and stuff. Or a broken hammer.

Well, I do like legos but I don’t get just one kind. I get all sorts of stuff. Harry potter legos, Star Wars legos and kinda original sets and stuff. We don’t go to Mc Donalds because um, well, (”mom is it just because they treat their animals bad and they don’t treat their treat their workers and pay them well?”) they have created an industry that creates a demand for in-humanely treated animals. My favorite foods are macaroni and cheese or just plain pasta with tomato sauce and cheese, I like salad. Do they have a Chevy’s where you live? Because their burritos there are really good. The bean and cheese ones. And their tortillas. In San Felipe where we were about 3 months ago, they had huge tacos with tortillas maybe a little smaller than a dinner plate. The most of them I ever ate was four. And I also like sweets too, pretty much every kind, except I don’t like chili much. Where you live, is chili a common dish? Because in CA, it isn’t. At least in the Bay Area where we used to live it isn’t. And I don’t really like chilis in candy either [in Mexico, it is very common to have spicy chilis in candy].

I also really like beanie babies. My favorite beanie baby that I ever had was called Mrs. Hunnybear. But that was just what I called her. She had another name on the tag but I forgot what it was but I think I’ll probably remember it sometime soon. I got it on a day I thought I lost a beanie baby from “Winnie the Pooh” called “Piglet”. And there was some women cleaning out the garage and I asked them if they had seen it or found it at all the woman said “no, but I have a large collection of pigs. I know how it is to loose one of my favorite pigs” and she brought out the ones that were most likely, but I liked them but none were the kind that I had so she said her mother had a store called “Remember When” in Fremont (thats where we were at the time). We had seen the store before but never gone inside so we went to the store and we found the Mrs. Hunneybears. We couldn’t find piglet (that’s what the pig was called) so we chose out the 2 yellow bears called Mrs. Hunnybear but at a campgound in Mexico (Ixtapan del Oro) we left them alone for a moment (the Mrs Hunnybears) and we came back and they weren’t there. We looked everywhere but we couldn’t find them, so and we couldn’t find any trace so we assumed they were stolen and we think they probably were.
Our trailer consists of there’s the big um, kitchen/livingroom, and there’s a door leading into our room, mine and Pike’s. We have our own bunkbed each; a top and a bottom bunk each. On each wall there’s a bunk; we use our bottom one for sleeping and our top bunks we play on. I like reading alot; I brought a small collection of Goosebumps books along and some mystery stories.

There are 6 people in our family. Our Dad and Mom, their real names are Jamie and Kitty; actually Jamie and Kathleen but Kitty is Mom’s nickname. And then there’s me and Pike; his real name’s Parker but his nickname’s Pike and my nickname’s Jess, but it’s really Jesse. And then there’s our 5 year old sister. A few days ago she learned to draw pretty good horses. And also she really likes them so she has a small collection of horses and a large one big enough to sit on and a doll named Sally. Sometimes she’s really fun to play with and sometimes she’s really annoying; it has its ups and downs; probably like your 4 year old brother that you mentioned. Me and Pike, just yesterday got a new tape player. But it also has MP3 playing capabilies that’s when you burn a CD on the computer you can play it and on the top it has a CD player. And then there’s the radio. It has two radio wavelengths; AM and FM. And an antenae like most radios have. And we each have a pair of walkman stereos.

I really like capturing their conversations…

In a quandry

Jamie and I have been going back and forth and back and forth trying to decide what we want to do. The place we’re staying at has very slowly, over the years, morphed from a dive shop and campground to an RV park to now a dive shop/restaurant/cabanas/rooms/RV park. There are many many “permanent” palapas here and seeing the ocean-front ones, it is easy to see why. Most of the ex-pats living here are 6 month-ers - they arrive in November and stay until April. The weather gets hotter here then, and some residents go back to the states to earn some money, while others are simply “Snowbirds”.

You cannot own land in Mexico which is within 50 miles of coastline, so everyone leases their palapa spot on a yearly basis. PaaMul is a turtle sanctuary and as such, no permanent structures (hotels, 4-walled structures) may be built. The restaurant is completely open air and all palapa interior rooms can only have 3 walls. With the weather never dipping below 70, it isn’t a problem. The owner of the property lives in a mansion-style house here on the property. Don’t ask how he got his 4 walls, but I’m sure it has something to do with being a Mexican national and owning the property. 

All the palapas are 6.5 meters by 13 meters and you then have about 3 meters of buffer between you and the next site. Unless you wrangle a site with buffer. Like a site next to the water tower (that no-one can build on) or a site on a curve (giving you a large wedge between your site and the next). There are 3 sites left on the property that have such a “buffer”. We are terribly tempted to invest here but the clincher is that we aren’t particularly interested in staying here. The area holds no interest for us, but is heaven to the divers and snorkelers and cave divers who frequent the area. Many of the retired folk are divers and this is their idea of heaven.

There is absolutely NO sales staff; as a matter of fact, it is next to impossible to talk to “Don Pepe” about leasing a lot; he is so very busy. It will cost about $4000 to build the palapa (which could, in the future be expanded upwards to include a second floor for an additional $4000). It will cost about $20-25K to build the palapa (one-story), put in a floor, tile, bathroom, appliances, etc. It is incredibly affordable. It seems like such a small investment ($25K plus $4K/year rent) with good return.
You cannot rent out the palapa in any way, shape or form, but family members can live in it. We would really like to find a “family member” who would like to live here at least 6 months of the year. We would pay for everything; they would be responsible for the $400/mo rent (all utilities) and in 5 years we’d look at selling. We would probably want to use the palapa a few months out of the year.
The property here is full of kids. It is amazing how many families have moved down here either permanently (all year) or part time (6 months). You’d expect it to be fully retired folk, and while they do out-number the families enormously, it is incredibly rare to see families on the road. The community is well represented by both Canadians and Americans but (and this is the rub for us) is a very isolated “English” community. If we were to put down roots in Mexico, I’d MUCH rather it be in a Mexican community. It just doesn’t feel like Mexico here. The nearby town, Playa del Carmen is growing rapidly and fueled by many tourist dollars. Great for someone relying on the tourist dollar to drive their business, but lousy for anyone looking for a real taste of Mexico.

So, that is our quandry. I think we’ll be kicking ourselves should we not select a site, but I just don’t want to live here the 5 years it would probably take to realize a large return on our investment.

Hey Jon and Mariluz - ever think about leaving Hawaii?

Postcards from the boys

Right now we’re in a beautiful RV park right next to the sea. We enjoy going around the trailer, scooping dirt into sand castle buckets and making a sand castle. Before one of the security guards said, “please can we not use any more water?”. We used to spray them to death (the castles, I mean). It was pretty good getting my ear pierced but it only hurt as much as it probably hurt you. You can go out into the sea when it is not wavy out and out to a coral reef where there’s all kinds of beautiful fish with wonderful colors. Not like the beaches in California. these beaches are very warm and pleasant. Last time I emailed you we were probably a thousand miles back. Think of this.. right now we should be 25,000 miles away from home. It’s a pretty damn long ways. but it was worth it getting here. It’s also a paradise to ride bikes. We did have a friend named “Emily” here and she was like, 10. But her sister had to get married [I, personally, don’t think she “had” to] so they left so we don’t have any friends here but there’s lots of stuff to do. I hope you’re really having a good time. Oh, and um, you don’t have to wait for the Star Wars movie for us. We’re not sure we’ll make it there in time. Here we might build a palapa. It’s like a bunch of sticks, wide enough for an RV to fit in, then they put coconut branches over. But it takes a few months to actually build it. [2 weeks] All the other times I’ve emailed you, we have either been sitting in Papa and Tata’s trailer or at the place we emailed you last time but this time we’re sitting in our own trailer emailing you. It’s been kind of hard for me to write emails to you because I miss you so much. Hope you have a good time.
From Pikey.

PS I turned nine almost a week ago. And happy birthday!


Mom said it’s really hard for you to read our emails, but I have to tell you some stuff. And if you can please try and write back. Here in PaaMul, we’re in a beautiful trailer park with palm trees which have coconuts on them but it’s illegal to chop them off. [it is a protected turtle sanctuary] But once and a while one will fall and you can pick it off the ground and hammer a nail into it and pull it out and do it a few times and then put it holes-down on the top of a cup and wait. When the milk stops draining out of the coconut you chop it in half, with a machete if you have one, (which we don’t) so we hit it with a hammer. Once it’s cracked open we scoop out the insides. If you’ve ever had coconut, and if you like it, you’ll know that the coconut milk looks just like water but has a very good taste. And the insides are white when it’s not dry; very kind of glassy-white. If it’s dry, it’s kind of a rough white color - like plaster.

Even when it’s wavy out you can go out into the Caribbean Sea, though it is harder to make it out to the coral reef. The coral reef isn’t as I’d imagined it. The coral is at least as thick as your head (most of it is at least) but some of it’s about as thick as your arm.

I don’t know the exact feet, but it’s about 1/2 km out - a bucket on a very thick branch. It’s used to signal the deep channel where the boats can come in and where the coral reef is so the boats don’t hit it. Me, Dad and Pike usually go out to that. We went out with Mom about two times we went to the bucket too. It’s a good place to rest for a little bit. There’s lots of kinds of fishies. Pike just came in. He says he just found a HUGE coconut. [they are now discussing how heavy it is] Me and Pike just agreed (Mom decided for us) it’s about a kilo heavy. It’s two pounds and a half; that’s how heavy a kilo is.

Just a bit ago, Mom read us an email that Jeff sent to her; just the parts that concerned you and stuff and Dad’s feeling fine. Dad’s got this really cool computer program called Limewire. It’s file sharing - it looks for open computers and finds song files and a lot of stuff and takes them to our computer and it can burn CD’s for us that means we decide what songs it burns and copies them onto a disk. Right now Dad’s playing a disc that he made.

Have you seen “A Knight’s Tale”? It has a sport called “jousting” in it. Two contestants ride horses with armour on them; themselves and the horses, and they ride at each other with dull wooden stakes called “lances” and try to knock each other off the horses. One point for breaking a lance between the torso and the neck; thought they don’t usually die in it. Two points for breaking a lance on the head and three for knocking the opponent off his horse (or her).

And anyway, you don’t really have to wait to watch the Star Wars movie if you don’t want to. Cause we’re kinda toying with the idea of buying a palapa here for a few months. [We’d be here MUCH longer than a couple months if we bought a palapa] We’ll tell you when we’re decided.

Well, that’s about all I have to say.

love, from jesse.

The boys and Sissy have just finished up Chapter 4 of Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer”. We have read two of the “Little House” series of books; House in the Big Woods and House on the Prairie (those titles should be pretty close) but Mark Twain has a very distinct style of writing. There is a LOT of vocabulary they’ve never heard before and prose they’ve never encountered. They’re begging for more.  I'd hoped they’d like “classical” literature but was worried that after initial exposure to the Harry Potter series and the Funke series (Eragon, Dragon Rider, etc.) their tastes would have skewed their interest.

We are hoping to find someone interested in living here in PaaMul in a palapa we would be building. We’re not interested in living in the area (mountains are 2-3 days away) but think it would be an amazing investment. If nothing pans out in the next week, we’ll be leaving pretty shortly. I’m looking forward to being back in the “real” Mexico. 

Oh My Goodness!!!

The day after I got the site up and running, the registrar locked the domain and refunded my payment suspecting fraud. I have no phone (WE TRAVEL IN AN RV IN MEXICO) and the domain registration request came from Mexico while our mail forwarding (address) is South Dakota. Now, to anyone who full-times, this makes absolute, perfect sense. How could you do anything differently?

Well, the folks at GoDaddy were not pleased. They demanded I fax or email them a copy of my driver’s license. In the states, that would be pretty simple. Here in Paa Mul, not so much. Telephone lines down here in camp (not an abnormal event) so, as we were headed to a bay down the coast, I figured we would fax from Tulum. I figured wrong.

We spent hot hours in which Ellen was stung by an army of red ants and Jamie found chocolate filled croissants. We did not, however, find a FAX machine that could send a FAX to the phone number we were given in the states for the GoDaddy fraud department.

Luckilly, I have a pretty savvy Daddy of my own, we’ll call him YOU-GO-BOY-Daddy, and he just this minute registered the domain for me. You GO Daddy! Seriously, I can’t thank him enough.
My contacts are about dried out and I’m using all the electricity in PaaMul to post this, so it is off to bed with me, but fear not, dear reader, I will have ALL of the morrow to delight and disgust you with amazing drivel.

Oh and pictures too.

Site tweaking

I’m done for the night. So far, I like this tweaked theme the best. I need to get rid of the flowers and figure out how to make the links (link 1,2,3,4) work, but that can wait.

This afternoon the boys and I headed out to the reef for our daily constitutional. I so wish I had some way to capture them on film. The swim to the reef is quite a nice little distance, and a bit difficult to get back from if it is choppy. The boys are so adept at snorkeling now - they can dive down and come back up spouting like little whales. We didn’t see too many fish today, but we saw the normal varieties. When we got to the reef there was a HUGE school of yellow-orange colored fish hanging in the crevices of the reef and hiding two very brilliant red fish. They swayed back and forth the with movement of the water. The boys dived down (the water wasn’t more than 10ft deep) over and over again and we hung out watching the fishies.

Tomorrow we hope to go down the coast a bit or maybe to Chichen Itza. I’m dreading going to the ruins because I know the girls won’t enjoy it and it will mean 6 hours in the car (ida y vuelta). It feels like a disaster waiting to happen. I’d like to convince Jamie to skip it - that it isn’t worth the disruption to the family, but who knows…

Tomorrow I also hope to have at least ONE theme working. Eventually, I’d like to have a little dialog box or something like that to allow the reader to pick their theme. I’ve seen it done; I just need to figure out how to incorporate it.

No pictures for now… oh golly! it looks like I need to find a spell check plugin…